Bob Hope is 100 years old today, he made it to the century mark and somewhere a lot of people are smiling. Elsewhere they aren’t and it looks like the 3rd Armored Cav is going to be sticking around Baghdad a little longer than planned. Another American was shot dead yesterday, and at this rate we will lose more this month in peace than we lost in the campaign.

Tony Blair is the first head of state to visit the country, if you except Don Rumsfeld’s nation, and the PM is down in Basrah in the British zone of occupation. He is taking some heat from the left of his own party about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. It seems to me that the hundreds of corpses they are digging up around the country ought to count for something but what do I know.

A pal sent me an e-mail over the weekend that indicated a religious finding, or “fatwah” has been posted in some of the Islamic chat rooms indicating that the Koran says it is really OK to slaughter the infidels with weapons of mass destruction. Apparently the bad guys kept shopping around until they found a Mullah mad enough to say publicly what they needed to hear to make whatever is coming next honorable in Islamic terms. I sigh and wish that faith would just get on and have their Reformation like everybody else and get on with life. They should concentrate on what is important and stop waving swords around. Since that is unlikely to happen, I keep my head down. It gives me a reason to keep going to work.

I am plugging along on my job and there have been some moments as the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary or whatever it is I do that have been pretty satisfying. I had to give a comment on a story to some reporter yesterday on the potential of a new drug. I was uncomfortable talking to her and was evasive. The reporter wanted a comment for the record. I finally wound up saying I was cautiously optimistic about it having some efficacy in the post-exposure scenario, that it was relatively low cost and appeared to have no side-effects. While Primate trials had been encouraging, there was no reliable data yet on humans and we were working with the FDA to encourage speedy evaluation.

Where else would I get a chance to say things like that? Things haven’t been quite so bad in the office since the Boss got his medication right. That is what I hear, no kidding. The Secretary braced me at the reception for the departure of the Chief of Staff and asked my frank and honest opinion on a variety of issues. I think I know where this is all going and I was evasive and said things were OK, generally.

I didn’t know what to do. I don’t want to be personally responsible for any ugliness, god knows there is enough of that around, and if I can get some talented people hired and some solid management in place things may improve. I will have both kids in college this fall, so I need to keep moving ahead. The whole situation with the Islamic rebels, the fatwah and all makes me feel like I just want to go live in the country. Gotta keep things in perspective, though, something we have a problem with at the office. After all, as Maynard Keynes observed….oh, never mind.

Anyhow, in the moments I get to lift my head from my computer screen I think about the weekend that is now sliding into the past. The wedding was a hoot. There was too much driving involved, from prospective target to target, Washington to Philly to New York and on toward Boston. But the wedding out in middle Massachusetts was a hoot.

It was on a commune, or something that could have passed for one. The place where the wedding was held was called Snow Farm, which presumably was the only crop they could reliably grow there in the old days. The industry on the farm has changed from agriculture to counter-culture. The accommodations were Spartan and the plumbing was shared. Snow Farm bills itself as an art-place and lesbian friendly on the literature and everybody was, friendly, that is.

The wedding party was a diverse crowd, old and young, academic and not. My college-roommate was the groom. and our old high-school gang flew in from all points of the compass and a couple continents. We are all semi-old farts, early fifties and ex-jocks. The bride is in her early forties, a lovely dark-haired lady. It was fantastic. There were several vaguely butch types with tattoos, crisp short hair, jeans and straight-ahead leather straps. They were equally distributed in the kitchen and service staff and the wedding party.

There was an official ceremony that happened sometime after the bar opened since the minister was late, my roomate was quite distinguished in his blue suit with his sandy hair cascading over his shoulders and the bride wore a traditional sari. After the meal of traditional Indian food a band played. The lead singer had a voice that was a cross between Carol King and that annoying Morrisette kid and her music was throaty and personal and quite moving. Then it was amateur hour and there was singing and dancing, some of it pretty darn good. At the end of that some of the band and some of the staff came on in costumes that looked straight from “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” The ladies belted out an anthem called Soft Dairy, which apparently was some sort of inside joke. It was a rollicking semi-rap rhyme. I wish I had the lyrics to the song. It went on for stanza after stanza, simple and pulsing. Lesbians driving cars, lesbians at the bars. Lesbians at the wheel, lesbians wearing heels. Each rhyme was followed with the shouted chorus “Who’s in the House? SOFT DAIRY!” as the rhyme to just about anything you want to think of.

Some of the older straight matrons were sort of astonished. My pals and I just looked on in amusement. After the DJ started spinning tunes and everyone was mellow and happy and the couples, all the kinds, hit the floor. It was a great time.

This morning, as I prepare to stumble off to the big building downtown I think about that. What it is about, really. Relax. Be happy. Be yourself. There isn’t enough time in life to do anything else, and after all someone might be planning to issue a fatwah against it.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra